The present invention relates in general to JavaScript function implementation. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for providing globalization functionalities for JavaScript applications.
JavaScript language is a scripting language for manipulating HTML documents in browsers. It has been widely adopted in a variety of Web applications to provide more accessible web pages and improve user experience. Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is a technology for developing Web applications that adopts a client side script and a Web server to asynchronously exchange data using the HTTP protocol. Asynchronous invocation is a feature of Ajax. By using this feature, Web applications are capable of dynamically updating contents on a Web page without refreshing the whole page. By using Ajax, a richer and more dynamic Web application user interface can be created. Its low response times and high availability can approach the properties of a local desktop application. At present, Ajax is a part of the JavaScript 1.3 standard and is supported by most mainstream browsers. More and more web applications exploit JavaScript and Ajax to provide comprehensive functionalities, rather than simply detect a browser or validate a certain form on a page.
In developing JavaScript applications with complicated functions, developers usually need to consider various globalization issues, for example, sorting a list of books according to names of the books and the locale without reloading the web page, formatting numbers according to the locale, formatting dates according to preferred local formatting styles, and the like. However, JavaScript provides very limited support for globalization and does not satisfactorily meet various needs presented by real-world scenarios. Therefore, there is a need for a rich set of globalization functions for addressing globalization issues in the JavaScript world, which includes the following functionalities: locale model, culture-sensitive functions, and multilingual support, etc.
Currently, there is no known framework or system that effectively provides a complete set of globalization functionalities for JavaScript applications.